Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday December 07, 2006 @12:27PM
from the bill-can-find-that-book dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is releasing its Live Search Books, a rival to Google's Book Search, in test, or beta, version in the US.
The digital archive will include books from the collections of the British Library, the University of California and the University of Toronto.
Books from three other institutions will be added in January 2007.
All the books currently included in the project will be non-copyrighted but later it will also add copyrighted work that publishers have given permission to include in the project."

Yes, Microsoft does. I can't help but wonder if their goal since they are 100 opt-in (as opposed to Google being opt-out) isn't to give bullets to those who want to sue Google for indexing all the books they can get their hands on : see, Microsoft ask for permission, why not Google!

I see some sort of strategy here - something very similar to what MSFT adopted against Apple, very succesfully - Building something that is cheaper, virtually the same - almost.

But the same rules may not apply in the world of online tools. Where GOOG is actually borrowing content to attract their actual product (i.e the users) whom them can then sell to customers (i,e advertisers) - Microsoft doesn't seem to have such a clear cut monetization plan from the looks of it. Seems to be more a case of dump enough money to smother the competitor approach, which I doubt will work with Google today.

I for one, would be more scared of Amazon and other publishers rather than such a half-hearted (peanut butter) effort by MSFT.

Well, lots of people pay Google for a privilege: that of their ads being shown on the service. It's how Google makes money. So Live could make advertisers pay less (or more efficiently, which amounts to pretty much the same, but is much more interesting and difficult to do) for ads.

Which is where my other phrase, "more efficiently" comes into play. I acknowledge a "normal" IT startup would have problems running against Google. It's not that Microsoft doesn't have them, it's the sheer amount of money it has to face them. They also have name recognition, which -surprisingly- they don't use this time: going to live.com shows they don't attach a "Microsoft" to the service, as they usually do. OK, they put a Windows this time, but it's not exactly the same (it actually should be "Microsoft

They've done this WindowsCE, to some degree of success. SinCE WinCE started, approx 7 years ago, they've been making a huge loss -- spending far more than the revenue form WInCE licenses. Other players actually have to live off their revenues, so they tend to pass out from hunger.

3 larger universities in Sweden (the one I work for is one of them) are about to add theyselve to MS Live Search book program. They are in the talking at this moment. This will give the project access to 30000+ volumes of books/researchs in scientific and humanitary fields.

Lack of innovation jokes aside, what does this buy Microsoft exactly? I can understand Google's craziness due to their goal of indexing the world's information - and as such Google also tends to have many projects that don't yield profitable results. But Microsoft? This is a software company first. Maybe a search engine company in a way. Yet I don't see how indexing books gains them ANYTHING, aside from just doing what Google is doing... because it's doing it. Much like a little little kid who emulate

Nonsense. Competition is good for the industry. While Microsoft are hardly known for being innovators, they have proven an ability to evolve an established idea. Google's book search will become better because of the competition Microsoft poses.

With regards to the actual search products, you're correct. But for the actual scanning effort, cooperation would make a lot more sense: I fail to see how scanning the same book multiple times benefits anyone. It's inefficient and ultimately wasted effort.

Ideally, all the companies interested in doing this should get together, pool their efforts and resources, and share the underlying dataset. Let the competition be for who can build the best product(s) around that data, not for the data itself.

Give away something for free that everyone wants, so you can install a piece of software on machines for other ventures.
(I'll never buy another Microsoft product if they ever install DRM that can't be removed via System Restore the next day)

Microsoft is releasing its Live Search Books, a rival to Google's Book Search, in test, or beta, version in the US.

I seriously think that people reading Slashdot know what "beta" means. Especially considering the "tagging beta" phrase that appears below every article summary. You can just say "beta" next time. Thanks.

You can argue that do better versions of what came before, but as far as basic inventions, no. If Microsoft (or Amazon, or AOL, or...) can do book scanning better, then let them.

OK, if Microsoft did better versions of the things they were copying there would be less complaining. Google is scanning books because it is trying to make all the world's information searchable. Amazon is scanning books because it is t

Apple didn't invent the WIMP interface, the people at Xerox's PARC did.

The PARC folks did WIP, the Mac group added the M after they licensed the tech from Xerox. See here [digibarn.com], here [digibarn.com], and here [digibarn.com]. They did have something like a right-click context menu in the videos I've seen, but that's not the M the M in WIMP means.

So the important fact isn't that they got three-and-a-half out of four, but that they didn't get the other half "right"? I'd say it's more important that they invented menus, along with the rest of WIMP, than the fact that they put it at the top of the screen or available through a right click.

The right-click context menu has been in many window environments/managers (windowmaker, afterstep, blackbox, quite possibly NeXTStep but I've never used it...), and one reason it was used is it's the nearest point

So the important fact isn't that they got three-and-a-half out of four, but that they didn't get the other half "right"? I'd say it's more important that they invented menus, along with the rest of WIMP, than the fact that they put it at the top of the screen or available through a right click.

But it wasn't a right-click menu, it was a series of buttons that could be exposed by an additional button. I'm assuming here you've seen an Alto or Star in action - have you?

Google is scanning books because it is trying to make all the world's information searchable. Amazon is scanning books because it is trying to make all the worlds' books portable (electronic). Microsoft is scanning all of the worlds books because _____ (fill in the blank).

Bunch of patents doesnt make something novel. PageRank is a simple tweak of Bibliometrics [wikipedia.org] methods.
From RTFW
Although citation analysis is nothing new (the Science Citation Index began publication in 1961), greater computing power is making it more useful and widespread. Google's PageRank is based on the principle of citation analysis.

Well, if we get finicky, it's an algorithm, so we don't talk much about "inventing it" and more of "coming up with it". After all, we wouldn't want those ugly software patents, would we?

Most things are "based" on something else. The important thing is: are they an innovation in their fields? Citation analysis might be the real original idea, but how used was it before in Computer Science? Lastly, I wouldn't call PageRank a "simple tweak" of anything.

PageRank, published in 1998, is an application of eigenvector centrality.HITS ("hubs and authorities") is another eigenvector-based method of ranking nodes in a network, also published in 1998 (in this case by Jon Kleinberg).

Eigenvector centrality itself was proposed as early as 1949 (Seeley, "The net of reciprocal influence") as a means of ranking nodes in a network. There were plenty of papers on this topic in the intervening 49 years. (The concept of eigenvectors, of course, is considerably older than

Tell me then, who was the company that first engaged libraries around the world about scanning their contents' for online searching?

Google, but I never said they weren't first.

Which company was it that decided to bring a GUI OS to the masses?

Interesting phrasing there... the answer to THAT question is Microsoft. Apple was the first to bring an extremely expensive, proprietary GUI to those that could afford it. Microsoft was the one (ironically) that fulfilled the promise of a GUI "for the rest of

You're saying all Google cares about is profit. Leading the way isn't the best way to profit - it's risky and idealistic. Microsoft doesn't play risky and idealistic.

I didn't say all that Google cares about is profit. But they wouldn't be scanning books if they didn't think there was a way to make a profit. And one could argue whether leading the way is the "best way" to profit, but it's silly to argue that it's a bad way to profit.

But they wouldn't be scanning books if they didn't think there was a way to make a profit.

Right, that's what businesses do. Some businesses go into new ventures to make a profit. Some businesses try to do things to improve society and try to find a way to make some money at it. Other business mimic existing successes and try to crush their competitors.

I could correct other things that are wrong in your post, but I grow weary. I'll just correct this last thing:

It was a fine aerial photography viewer website

No, it was an Earth image viewer ("Terra"-server) that dynamically created satellite views of the earth based on longitude, latitude and altitude. You seem to be under the odd notion that it was a slide show, which is just absurd.

Some businesses try to do things to improve society and try to find a way to make some money at it. Other business mimic existing successes and try to crush their competitors.

Google has done plenty of "me too" and buying out of competitors. They bought Deja News and turned it into Google Groups. They bought YouTube when their video search wasn't competitive. They got into email, chat, and god knows what else, when they originally said they were going to stick to search. I'll credit you that Google

OK, then Microsoft had nothing to do with TerraServer, they got that from Ariel Images.

Actually, Microsoft licensed the imagery from Ariel Images (and the Russian Space Agency), but TerraServer was MS's alone. It was a SQL Server research project for Microsoft's "Scalability Day [microsoft.com]" dog&pony show back in 1997 (Gates discusses it about halfway down the page). The idea was to show a SQL server indexing and serving a terabyte of data (which was an insane amount of data back then). It turns out that satell

Indeed. When Microsoft launched their Virtual Earth 3D Beta I started a new tag "makincopies" because it was obviously just an imitation of Google Earth. And in no big surpise to me, I now have another article to tag.

Please Microsoft, do something new that's not copying Apple and Google....

Why? So you can post on/. how MS is is shunning all the "standards" out there and how terrible it is that they always have to do their own things when there's already perfectly good solutions out there for all kinds of stuff?

but when is MS going to actually release something *new*? how about skipping book search and taking a risk with something that google hasn't already done?

for example, i think their efforts on XNA game studio [microsoft.com] are of they type they should do more often: it leverages their core strengths (dev tools and 3d graphics), takes advantage of existing products with wide install bases (yes, duh..windows - but i really mean directx) and is INTERESTING and EXCITING and something GOOGLE CAN'T MATCH NEXT WEEK.

If Microsoft is so dedicated to online books and thinks it's such a great idea, I wonder why they didn't contribute to an already well-established site, like The Gutenberg Project [gutenberg.org] which got its start back in 1971.

I once worked for Wang Labs circa 1990, and I noticed that many of the things Wang did seemed quite inexplicable... until you considered IBM. Then the pattern became clear. Whatever IBM did, Wang tended to do something similar six months to a year later.1984, IBM acquires Rolm. Much press ink spilled about how IBM is about to become a leader in the combined computer-telecommunications industry. Shortly thereafter Wang acquires an communications company called Intecom. 1988, IBM spits out Rolm. It appears th

If you're thinking of DRM, no. The PDF files you can download are not password-protected. They do require an extra plug-in for some PDF readers because of the image format they use (I think it's JBIG2, but not sure), though there's nothing to stop you converting them to a more widely-used format.

lol nah i was thinking about the way they only sell software for their own os, push developers to use their proprietary api's and provide incentives for oems and businesses to use thier os in a way to limit competition, and using the same tactics on literature. the way china restricts access to damaging information, or any literature that may undermine thier interests.

its very unlikely, mainly just a cheap-shot, anti-microsoft linux fanboyism and such. however it is possible.

Well it was a fair question I thought:-) My first thought when I downloaded a book was "right, how do I go about removing a password from a PDF file again?" It's just that I turned out not to need to...

I'm working on the 100 greatest books list and trying to read them comprehensively not just to say I did it. I'm not a disciplined or fast reader and I probably only get through 5-10 fiction books a year, so I spend a lot of time rereading sections I can't interpret. I spent about 30 minutes sifting through War and Peace one night trying to find the passage "God, death, love, brotherhood of man." For those of us looking for these kinds of passages or favorite quotes, this is awesome.

I've been hearing about this new service for a bit, and the *great* thing that I'm hearing is a severe lack of complaining. The news media isn't making a stink about this, because Microsoft is making a concerted effort to start with only out-of-copyright books. This is the first step, and it's a step that Google should have done correctly.

Note also that this MS product, while I don't think it's quite as easy to navigate as Google's, is very specifically about putting books online, and giving them to

Note also that this MS product, while I don't think it's quite as easy to navigate as Google's, is very specifically about putting books online, and giving them to anyone that wants them. No "previews." No gimmicks. Just books. Sure, they call it Book Search, but once you find the book, there's a link to "Download The Entire Book" in pdf format.

Can anyone suggest a single thing that Microsoft has done in the last few years that could be described (loosely) as innovative from the point of view of the end users of their products? By that I would exclude things like the.NET platform, which Joe Sixpack knows nothing about.Is it Clippy? Might it be the Strip in the new Office? It surely is not Book Search, the Zune or IE7... I'm really struggling here, yet they are one of the largest corporations on earth. Something is seriously wrong with Microsoft.

You could call windows a DOS clone. Linux isn't a unix clone, they are seperate systems. Operating systems work differently but come up with an end product, which is a platform desktop and web apps can run on. Thats where the real diversity starts, but perhaps not in this case. I'm quite sick of MS calling itself inovative and leeching off other peoples good work.

If you want to show anger towards linux, I recommend choosing a different path than complaining about it being built to standards like Posix and SUS.

Wait... but when MS makes something strictly to a standard then they're... "a copycat"? And when they're making something to a standard but then improve on it then it's "embrace, extend, control"? And if they do something that's completely different from any existing standard people moan how non-standard MS products are? So what exactly are they supposed to do?

One day I'd like to hear one of you folks tell me what exactly you'd want MS to do that wouldn't make you whine about it reflexively...

drafting, in motor sports it reduces drag. in running, its more of a mental thing. its tougher to gauge your pace when your leading the pack, and you can just settle in behind and then out kick him at the end.

I have a vague memory of reading some research some years ago that indicated there was a measurable reduction in air resistance even for runners. I may be misremembering, though (perhaps playing with too many virtual cameras), or maybe it's been disproved.